The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Academic Health Sciences Library Statistics 2007-2008, which presents data that describe collections, expenditures, personnel, and services in 64 medical libraries at ARL member institutions throughout North America.

In 2007-2008, the reporting health sciences libraries held a median of 240,955 volumes, spent a total of $240,019,298 and employed 2,304 FTE staff. Expenditures for materials and staff accounted for the bulk of total expenditures, at 49% and 42% respectively. Respondents reported spending a total of $81,986,136 for electronic materials, or an average of 76% of their total materials budgets; this includes a total of $76,921,558 for electronic serials.

University of British Columbia Library is seeking an energetic, creative and experienced leader, capable of envisioning, developing and implementing the UBC Library's digital strategy and infrastructure all within the context of a rapidly changing environment.

This work will include providing stewardship and leadership to creating and developing the Libraries' digital services program; providing conceptual direction to the library's existing and future digitization services and projects, and defining and shaping the work of staff engaged in digital initiatives.

The position will collaborate with staff and departments to assess the appropriateness and applicability of digital initiatives projects and will steward the planning, development and implementation to ensure projects support the library's goals. Additionally, the position will provide leadership to the development of supporting metadata thereby enabling effective creation and management, search, discovery, and presentation as well as long term digital preservation.

The Director will provide strategic leadership to specific activities involving copyright, standards, digital projects and cIRcle and will be involved with matters relating to usability studies, materials preparation,costing/budget analysis; proposals for digitization work. This position also participates in the work of the Library Operations Management Group.

The Director, Library Digital Initiatives will advocate for the program and give presentations locally, nationally and internationally. The Director will lead cooperative activities within the University and the Community essential to program development. The position will represent UBC Library nationally and internationally and undertake professional responsibilities which will foster long term relationships and support the goals of the UBC Library.

This position reports to the University Librarian, works Library-wide and closely with all levels of staff to develop and implement digital initiatives strategies and projects and provides strategic leadership to staff involved in library wide digital activities and projects including cIRcle, Scholarly Communications, Copyright, Standards, Digitization Projects.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Statistics 2007-2008, the latest in a series of annual publications that describe the collections, staffing, expenditures, and service activities of ARL's 123 member libraries. Of these member libraries, 113 are university libraries (14 in Canada, 99 in the US); the remaining 10 are public, governmental, and private research libraries (2 in Canada, 8 in the US).

ARL libraries are a relatively small subset of libraries in North America, but they account for a large portion of academic library resources in terms of assets, budgets, and the number of users they serve. The total library expenditures of all 123 member libraries in 2007-2008 was more than $4.1. billion; of that total, over $3.1 billion was spent by the 113 university libraries and $1 billion was spent by the 10 nonuniversity libraries.

File formats are the principal means of encoding information content in any computing environment. Preserving intellectual content requires a firm grasp of the file formats used to create, store and disseminate it, and ensuring that they remain fit for purpose. There are several significant pronouncements on preservation file formats in the literature. These have generally emanated from either preservation institutions or research projects and usually take one of three approaches:

recommendations for submitting material to digital repositories

recommendations or policies for long term preservation or

proposals, plans for and technical documentation of existing registries to store attributes of formats.

More recently, attention has broadened to pay specific attention to the significant properties of the intellectual objects that are the subject of preservation. This Technology Watch Report has been written to provide an overview of these developments in context by comparative review and analysis to assist repository managers and the preservation community more widely. It aims to provide a guide and critique to the current literature, and place it in the context of a wider professional knowledge and research base.

Oxford Brookes has recently launched its blended institutional repository, RADAR (Research Archive and Digital Assets Repository). Based in the library, you will take the lead and co-ordinate the development of the RADAR research repository as a service across the university. You will also work closely with the e-Learning Systems Developer to provide advice on the development of the Brookes learning objects repository.

RLUK is very pleased to announce that David Prosser has been appointed Executive Director. David joins us from SPARC Europe, where his leadership and advocacy skills have played a critical role in the success of the European Open Access movement.

The Chair of RLUK, Dr Mark Brown of the University of Southampton said: "We are delighted that David will be joining us as our new Executive Director. David brings ten years' experience of shaping strategic thinking for an active membership organisation, and encouraging partnerships and collaborations which can bring together librarians, publishers, and funders. We look forward to David playing a key role in delivering our exciting new strategy."

David Prosser said: "It is a great honour to join RLUK as the new Executive Director. These are exciting times for research libraries in terms of new delivery of content, use of physical space and the ways in which researchers and students use our collections. They are also potentially difficult times as public spending tightens and decisions need to be made on priorities for the future. Now, more than ever, the UK community needs to speak with a strong voice to ensure that the case for research libraries is heard. We also need to look for innovative collaborative solutions for budgetary issues. I look forward to working with the Board, members, and RLUK staff to address these issues and help fulfill the RLUK vision of ensuring that the UK should have the best research library support in the world."

University Library Technology Services (ULTS) provides technology planning and systems infrastructure to support the services of all Tufts libraries at three campuses. Our primary mission is to provide highly available and secure systems to permit acquisition; cataloging and classification; identification; location and authorized access by the Tufts community to general shared physical and electronic collections, ultimately in support of the teaching, learning, and research mission of the University. Millennium is the library's integrated system which includes the university's library collections database, as well as acquisitions, cataloging and circulation functional modules. Our services are high-use, high-profile and extended to users with rare exceptions for 24/7 service.

The University Library Systems Manager provides technical systems support for the shared technology services of the five Tufts Libraries including primary management and support of the libraries' Innovative Interfaces Millennium server.

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.